


Insomnia

by hurricanine



Category: Grand Theft Auto V
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-25
Updated: 2013-11-27
Packaged: 2018-01-02 15:52:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,569
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1058680
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hurricanine/pseuds/hurricanine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Michael often suffers from insomnia and loses himself in different tasks, ranging from practical to unhinged. A 'Five Times +One' fic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Guns, Cupcakes, and Babies

**Author's Note:**

> Headcanon stolen shamelessly from Synekdokee. Just blame her for 90% of the fics that I wrote, yo. She's an enabler.

1.

It's four in the morning and there's an entire arsenal laid out on the motel table, disassembled and gleaming. Michael wipes his fingers off on a rag, his head filled with the smell of gun oil and metal. Quietly, methodically, he picks up the pieces of his pistol and slots them together. There is something calming in the act and, with the rest of the world quiet and dark, Michael is alone with his thoughts.

The long barrel of a rifle is a comfortable weight in his palm. He assembles the gun, now free of gunpowder and grime and dirt and blood, and wonders if it could be that easy to put his own life together.

It's half past four and the guns are lined up in a row, little boxes of bullets stacked with a measured precision. With the mindless distraction that comes with idleness, Michael rubs his thumb over a notch in the grip of Trevor's shotgun. They're starting to run low on shells; his partner is more than a little trigger happy. He could leave now, find the nearest corner store and pick up a few cartridges from a bleary-eyed cashier.

A quarter until five and Michael's taken his pistol apart again. He reassembles it by touch alone, just to keep his hands busy. He wants to blame his insomnia on excitement, on the unshakeable thrill of the heist, but they're a week between jobs, hard-earned cash spent on cheap booze and cheaper women. He supposes there are worst things to do with his time.

There is a shift in Trevor's breathing and Michael glances up, catches the dark glint of the other man's eyes across the motel room.

“What time 's it?”

“Early,” Michael says quietly. Or late, in his case. It doesn't really matter. “Go back to sleep.”

 

 

2.

Michael doesn't last a week at home before he's wishing he was back on the road. Mandy is eight months pregnant, alternating between demands for food and foot rubs, up every five minutes with the baby kicking at her bladder. It's after midnight and she wants chocolate chip cookies, but all the stores within driving distance are closed and the cookies need to be _fresh, dammit Michael!_

He peers into the hot glow of the stove, a spoonful of raw cookie dough in his mouth; he wonders, not for the first time, what life will be like with a baby. He can't picture leaving Amanda alone with a kid, but it's not like he can go out and get a nine-to-five job, shit. They've got a big heist planned, something Lester's been going on about for a while, and it'll keep their pockets lined with cash for a long time. It's too good to pass up, even if Amanda's threatened to kill him if he isn't there when the baby is born.

It's two o'clock and there are two sheets of cookies cooling on the countertop, a dozen cupcakes slowly rising golden and perfect in the oven. They haven't picked out a name, yet. It's a girl, they know that much; Mandy keeps talking about pink cribs and pink blankets and pink-painted walls, but there's only one bedroom in the apartment and no room for a nursery.

Around three in the morning, Amanda wanders into the kitchen. She rubs her eyes with the back of one hand, the other resting on the curve of her belly. Michael thinks she looks about to burst and can't fathom how she's got a month left to go.

“What are you _doing_ , Michael?”

He glances down at the tube of frosting in his hand, the delicate swirls and dabs of icing atop the cupcakes.

“Uh. Baking?”

Amanda waddles closer – _oh god_ , _don't laugh, Michael, she'll rip your balls off with her bare hands if you laugh_ – and picks up a still warm cookie, munching on it as she inspects his hard work.

“These look nicer than mine, you asshole.”

They eat cookies and cupcakes until Amanda yawns and pillows her head against Michael's shoulder. He's still not sure if he's cut out for married life, but he thinks that with enough moments like these, it might be worth it.

 

 

3.

The living room is lit only by the soft glow of the light over the stove in the kitchen; occasionally a car will drive past on the street below, pitching the room into momentary brightness. Michael can't see the clock from here, but he knows it's late; his arm has fallen asleep, pins and needles every time he dares to shift, and he's had to piss for at least an hour.

But Tracey's head is tucked into the crook of his neck, her tiny, fluttering breath ghosting against his skin. She's drooled a wet patch into his shirt, her sticky fingers holding tight even in the depths of sleep, and her hair is falling out of the pigtails she demanded he put in before bed – but Michael's never seen something so beautiful. His little girl is about to turn three years old and she shines brighter than the sun in his life.

On top of that, Jimmy has finally started sleeping through the night. He's a fussy baby and when he wakes, Tracey wakes, and Amanda's got bags under her eyes from dealing with a toddler and an infant. Michael is, for once, grateful for his insomnia.

With utmost care, the steady attention he has put to disarming locks and cracking bank vaults in the past, Michael lays Tracey down onto the couch which serves as her bed. She snuffles in her sleep and releases her grasp on him, rolling over and clutching at her teddy bear instead. He smiles, strokes his fingers through her hair, and commits this moment to memory.

He never imagined he would be a dad. For such a long time, Michael had sworn to himself that he never would be. The fear still strikes him, sometimes – a mindless panic that leaves him short of breath, a gut-wrenching _terror_ that he might turn out like his own father.

But his children, oh... They're perfect. Tracey, with her gap-toothed smile and golden hair, the boundless love that only children are capable of, and chubby little Jimmy with his petulant babble-talk. Michael wants to be there for them, more than he's ever wanted anything, but he'll be leaving in a few days for a job up north and he knows he'll miss the three-in-the-morning diaper changes, he'll miss yawning and bouncing Jimmy on his hip as he waits for a bottle of formula to heat up, he'll miss cleaning spaghetti-o's and syrup out of Tracey's hair after a pre-dawn breakfast gone wrong. None of the guys would understand – not even Trevor, who is completely besotted with his new 'niece' and 'nephew' – but it's enough for Michael just to have this.


	2. Cash, Coloring Books, and Trevor

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Still inspired by, and dedicated to, Synekdokee.

4.

The phone rings sharply through the house. Michael picks it up before it can ring a second time. He holds his breath for a moment, listening, but can hear no other sound; it didn't wake Amanda or the kids.

“What?” he answers, his voice pitched low.

“Well, aren't you just a ball of sunshine, Mikey.” Trevor's voice is a little too loud, a little too bright. Michael wonders if it's drugs, or just Trevor being... well, _Trevor_. He squints at the clock which hangs on the wall over the sink.

“It's three in the morning, T.”

“Yeah, couldn't sleep!”

Michael groans. “So you decided to call me and wake me up instead?”

“Knew you'd be up.”

He glances down at the pile of laundered cash on the table, the precise piles he has sorted it into. “Yeah, fuck off.”

Trevor laughs and, from the other end of the line, he hears a sound like the horn of an 18-wheeler blaring in the distance – for a moment, in startling clarity, he can imagine Trevor leaning up against a payphone, his breath fogging in the pre-dawn chill, stamping his feet in the snow to ward off the cold.

The house feels a little too warm. His thoughts are drawn to the steady breathing of his children in the other room, of the soft heat of Amanda's body beneath the covers. Part of him wants to offer Trevor the couch for the night, though he has no idea where the other man is. He knows, however, how mad Amanda would be if she woke up to Trevor Philips in the house, unannounced, so Michael keeps his mouth shut.

“Go get some sleep, T,” he says. There's no point in going to bed now. He stacks up the bills and starts sorting them again. The smell of the money, linen and paper and a hundred other human hands, gets stuck in his nose.

“Yeah, M, you too.”

 

 

5.

The light in the lamp flickers, a surge of power or a fault in the bulb - Michael doesn't care. His breath comes evenly, measured and tight, as he moves his hand across the paper. He's usually only this calm and centered when he's got a gun in his hand; who would have thought a few stubby crayons and a coloring book could achieve the same effect?

It had made him laugh to open his duffel bag and find it tucked between a layer of clothing; Tracey must have slipped it into his bag before he left. She hadn't wanted him to go, of course, throwing an impressive fit for a five-year-old, bawling until her face turned red and snotty.

The first few pages are marked up with her attempts at coloring inside the lines, pastels of pink and blue and yellow making masterpieces out of the black and white outlines of cheerful ponies. It's her favorite coloring book, Michael remembers that much, and it warms his heart to trace over those childish scribbles.

He finds another page free of Tracey's handiwork and begins filling in the lines, oranges and blues and greens. It doesn't matter that the colors clash, or that he's thirty years old and coloring with crayons. It's four in the morning, the world is still in the hush before waking, and Trevor is fast asleep on the bed across the room. It's peaceful, and it's better than the thousand other things he could be doing to pass the time.

Eventually, Michael runs out of crayons. The sheets of the bed are scratchy and stale, and counting ceiling tiles is less interesting than coloring, but he manages a few hazy snatches of sleep and the deep indigo of twilight gives over to a blinding sunrise. Trevor is already up, moving around the motel room and laughing under his breath – something which has never boded well. Michael groans as he sits up, his body stiff and protesting, and he knows right away what has so thoroughly amused his partner this morning.

“I never knew you were such an artist, Mikey.”

Michael groans and flips over in the bed, burrowing into the twisted wad of blankets, for all the good it does. The mattress dips beneath Trevor's weight as he sits, half on Michael's back. He can hear the ruffle of pages as the other man thumbs through the coloring book.

“We'll send these back to Amanda, huh? Have her put 'em up on the fridge with Lil' T and J's.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Michael mumbles, the words muffled by his face shoved into the pillow. He wonders if he could die like this without Trevor noticing.

 

 

+1:

Michael's spends a lot of long nights trying to pinpoint when exactly the two-in-the-morning silence turned from peaceful to suffocating – he figures it's somewhere around him selling his crew out to the FIB and making his family leave everything behind to come to this shit-stain of a city. Even now, with Devin Weston and Steve Haines taken care of, even now, with more money in the bank than he could ever hope to spend, sleep doesn't come easily.

He wonders how he ever enjoyed being alone with his thoughts. He can't imagine being comfortable with the silence again, not when he has a lifetime of failures and mistakes to keep him company.

Drinking helps.

The only light in the bedroom is the moon filtering in through the window. Michael pours himself a glass of whiskey, closing his eyes against the burn of the liquor down his throat. His mind is wired, spinning endlessly like he's got four tires in the mud and can't take his foot off the gas.

He's not sure when Trevor shows up – he's been doing that lately, coming around uninvited, ambling around the place like he's right where he belongs. Michael's got the bottle in hand, thinking about pouring a second glass, when Trevor leans against the doorframe and smirks; probably says a lot to how lonely and pathetic he's become, that he doesn't tell Trevor to leave.

\- - -

It's almost five in the morning and Michael has no idea how he ended up like this – face pressed against the pillows to muffle the noises he's making, back taut and muscles quivering, hips jerking helplessly in the air.

He wants to blame the alcohol, but the only thing clouding his brain is how goddamn good Trevor's fingers feel inside him, pushing and pressing relentlessly until he's seeing stars, until he's moaning shamelessly, hell, probably begging for it too. Whatever brain-mouth filter he might have possessed before is broken into pieces, left with the scraps of clothes and dignity on the bedroom floor.

A cure for insomnia – _shit_. Michael hadn't believed it for a second, but it made for a good excuse at the time.

Trrevor's dick is riding against the back of his thigh, leaving trail of slick as Trevor shifts distractedly against him. Michael has just enough time to regret his insistence on not wanting to be fucked when Trevor leans in and slides his tongue in alongside his fingers. It's _filthy_.

“Wh- _What the fuck_ , Trevor!” Michael squirms, but Trevor's got him tight by the hips, holding hard enough to press bruises into the skin. Michael moans, surprising himself with the volume of it, as Trevor curls his tongue sweet and slow. That's all it takes to turn his protests into faintly murmured encouragements, soft gasps and needy whines that he is _never_ going to live down.

He comes too fucking quick, too; the tension melts from his shoulders, his mind blissfully quiet, as grinds against the thousand-count sheets. There's the indecent sound of skin on skin, Trevor jacking off behind him. He's got the nerve to come on Michael, the head of his cock pushing right up against where his mouth was moments ago. Michael should want to twist away, should want to put as much distance as he can between Trevor and Trevor's dick, but he shivers and bites his lip through a groan. By the drawn-out, self-satisfied sound Trevor makes, Michael imagines it's quite a sight.

“You're fuckin' disgusting,” Michael mutters, clumsily wiping at his skin with his hand, wiping his hand off on the bed. Trevor flops back on the bed beside him, looking smug and unconcerned. Before he can think of a reason to kick Trevor out, his eyelids grow heavy and his jaw cracks with the force of a yawn. The pillow is the softest thing he's ever felt as his head thumps against it, a snore already on its way.


End file.
